Paul G. Kengor – The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City Collegehttp://www.visionandvalues.org
At The Center for Vision & Values, we view a love for truth and a love for liberty as inseparable allies. We are a conservative think tank promoting conservative thought on today's issues.Fri, 09 Mar 2018 23:55:19 +0000en-UShourly1Winston Churchill’s Darkest Hourhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2018/01/winston-churchills-darkest-hour/
Tue, 16 Jan 2018 15:10:00 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14969Last Saturday I dropped off my two oldest sons and their friend at the theatre. I planned to kill a couple of hours at the bookstore, on my laptop, at a coffee shop, whatever. When I got out of the … More>]]>Last Saturday I dropped off my two oldest sons and their friend at the theatre. I planned to kill a couple of hours at the bookstore, on my laptop, at a coffee shop, whatever. When I got out of the car the balmy two-degree temperature in Pittsburgh prompted second thoughts. Instead, I strolled into the theater complex, looked around, and saw a poster for “Darkest Hour.” I vaguely knew it was a movie about Winston Churchill. I bought a ticket and went in.

I was hooked from the opening scene: a grim, dank, colorless House of Commons, nothing like the fun and festive place you see when you click on C-SPAN on Sunday night to watch “Question Time” with the prime minister. This was interrogation time with the prime minister, with Neville Chamberlain in the dock on May 9, 1940, while Labour Party opposition leader, Clement Attlee, barked at him for his failed accommodation of Adolph Hitler.

2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. We invite you to join us this year at our annual conference as we discuss “World War I and the Shaping of the Modern World.” Click here for more information.

Attlee, of course, would one day go on to nationalize everything his Fabian socialists could get their covetous government hands on, and Churchill in this film nicely refers to him as “that wolf in sheep’s clothing, Attlee.” At this moment, however, Attlee was spot-on. Chamberlain had fully earned the evisceration.

It’s after this opening that we see Winston Churchill for the first time—instantly riveting because of the incredible performance by the leading man. I had walked into this movie cold (literally), with no clue of the actors, the writer, the directors, the producers. Not until the credits did I find out who played Churchill. It was Gary Oldman. I would have never guessed it. Oldman was flatly amazing.

There are plenty such kudos to go around for this film. Among the characters and those who played them: Churchill’s wife (Kristin Scott Thomas), Anthony Eden (Samuel West), Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane), King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn), and the young woman (Lily James) who had the lead female role as Churchill’s secretary/typist. The writer was Anthony McCarten, whose script was superb.

McCarten and director Joe Wright delivered so many fine scenes, from the tragedy at Calais to the capitulation of France. As to the latter, in one painful exchange Churchill asks French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud incredulously, “Tell me how you plan to counterattack.” To Churchill’s horror, the leader of France responds: “There is no plan.” Reynaud and one of his lackeys sniff at the Brits for being so “delusional.” Churchill is less delusional than aghast. “France must be saved!” he insists. That, unfortunately, was not the French plan.

“Darkest Hour” depicts all of this so beautifully and so, well, visually, which history books and news reels cannot or could not do.

But above all, the takeaway from this film—and from the Churchill experience—is an enduring historical-moral lesson: you cannot negotiate a just peace with a brutal aggressor. Savages are not appeased. This is poignantly captured when Churchill snaps at Viscount Halifax and Neville Chamberlain: “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in his mouth!”

What makes that moment and this overall film so valuable is the paramount fact that Churchill is shouting at Halifax and at Chamberlain, both Conservatives, both looking to negotiate “peace in our time” with Hitler, and neither of which had quietly disappeared when Churchill took the helm on May 10, 1940. We tend to have a nice, tidy, black-and-white view of what happened in Britain when Chamberlain stepped aside. We assume that Chamberlain vanished and then Churchill vanquished; there was hence an immediate change in tone, policy, direction, vision.

This film, however, shows what really occurred, namely: Chamberlain and Halifax became part of Churchill’s official War Cabinet and remained tacit leaders of the Conservative Party, while the disrespected Churchill was merely a compromise prime minister leading a precarious coalition government in which the Labour Party accepted him more than his own Conservative Party had. Thus, Churchill still had to deal with intense pressure to settle with Hitler, as Chamberlain and Halifax pushed him relentlessly to “negotiate terms” with the Nazis—with Benito Mussolini their recommended splendid mediator. It was a lousy situation for Churchill, who faced a possible vote of no confidence if he couldn’t keep Chamberlain and Halifax on the reservation.

That ugly internal battle, which is the core of the movie, went on for an extraordinarily decisive month of May 1940, when Churchill soul-searched, struggled, lost sleep, drank, nearly wobbled, and Britain could have caved. Ultimately, Britain stood strong because Churchill—in his courage—refused to stick his head near the mouth of the tiger. Churchill said “Never!” to the Fuhrer. That course both inspired his people and had been inspired by his people.

And the rest is history.

Churchill’s “Darkest Hour” was, in truth, a series of dark hours that lasted two or three weeks in May 1940, when Western civilization hung in the balance. He was severely tested. He responded with bouts of confidence and doubt, turmoil and inspiration, cigars and (lots of) alcohol—as Oldman shows so vividly. Ultimately, mercifully, he persevered. This powerful film portrays what he was up against and how he prevailed—a rousing lesson from the time and for the ages.

]]>Remembering Fidel Castro’s Deathhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/12/remembering-fidel-castros-death/
Wed, 06 Dec 2017 13:58:08 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14863Editor’s note: A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

This past week marked the anniversary of the death of Fidel Castro, our hemisphere’s worst dictator for a half century. When we remember Castro’s death, … More>

]]>Editor’s note: A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

This past week marked the anniversary of the death of Fidel Castro, our hemisphere’s worst dictator for a half century. When we remember Castro’s death, we should remember him for just that: death.

Expressing the depths of Fidel’s destruction is impossible in a short article. But among the corpses under his despotism were the thousands who perished while trying to escape his island-prison by swimming nearly 100 miles to American shores.

A testimony to that desperation was recently provided to my students at Grove City College by a Cuban citizen, who I must leave nameless. In describing her citizens’ surreal lives under totalitarian communism, she noted that only recently have Cubans been allowed to visit their beautiful beaches, and even then only under strict surveillance. That’s a stunning thought for a country literally surrounded by beaches. And yet, Cubans are banned from their beaches because their government fears they’ll dash into the deep water and start paddling profusely for freedom—swimming all the way for Florida.

Imagine that. Try to conceive the utter despair. Try to wrap your mind around the cruelty of a government not even letting its suffering citizens escape—a regime so repressive that it will not dare avert its gaze for a moment lest its people attempt the physically unimaginable in the agonizing hopes of dashing from this Marxist police state.

We already know that Cuba is a bizarre island without boats. Look at satellite images of Cuba. No boats! There’s also no fishing industry, and people don’t have the luxury of eating fish. (They largely eat chicken, pork, rice, beans.) Why no boats? Why no fishermen? Because fishermen bolt the first chance they get—just like swimmers.

For the record, how many people have attempted the swim since Castro took over in 1959? It’s difficult to say. In 1999, the Harvard University Press classic, The Black Book of Communism, estimated that some 100,000 Cubans had risked the treacherous journey. Of those, perhaps as many as 30,000 to 40,000 died from drowning. As those in the sea bob for breath, the government on occasion has employed the resources of the state to sink them, dropping large bags of sand at them from helicopters hovering above.

Yes, actually dropping sandbags.

As we consider the tens of thousands who’ve drowned, compare it to another glaring number: zero. That’s the total number of Americans who have attempted the swim to Cuba, including all those merry liberals raving about the wondrous “free” education and healthcare awaiting humanity in the Castro collectivist utopia.

Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, speaks of “the gates test.” To wit: when a nation opens its gates, in which direction does humanity flow? Well, when the United States leaves its borders unchecked, the refugees stream in. In the communist world, the apparatchiks had to build a wall in Berlin to keep the captives contained. In Cuba, they can’t even visit their beaches. I imagine the communists in Cuba would earnestly have followed the example of their old comrades in East Germany and built a wall around the beaches—if they could afford it.

Aside from those who drowned, how many others died under Fidel Castro?

Those numbers likewise run into the thousands. There were the more traditional Marxist methods: bullet to the head, deprivation, succumbing to inhumane prison conditions. The numbers vary, but the range of dead from those means is typically between 10,000 and 20,000, whether victims of long-term imprisonment or outright execution by bullets.

Fidel’s onetime executioner-in-chief, Che Guevara, today an icon to profoundly ignorant college students who sport the cruel psychopath on their t-shirts, is estimated to have overseen as many as 2,000 executions (some of which he personally performed) during the brief period he ran Fidel’s execution pit at the La Cabana concentration camp. Beyond Che’s “bloodthirsty” (he charmingly used that word to describe himself in a letter to his wife) achievement, many more Cubans were liquidated by other state assassins. In all, most credible estimates place the total dead somewhere between 15,000 to 18,000. That’s a lot of people for a tiny island. And again, it doesn’t include those who drowned while attempting an incredible swim.

The late professor R. J. Rummel, an expert on the sordid subject of death by government, estimates that from 1959-87 alone, the grand total of cadavers produced by Fidel ranged from 35,000 to as high as 141,000. How’s that for a resume? Actually, for a communist leader, it’s pretty typical.

As we pause to remember Fidel Castro at the one-year anniversary of his demise, let us remember him for what he achieved the most: tyranny, repression, and death.

]]>The Kremlin, LBJ, and the JFK Assassinationhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/11/the-kremlin-lbj-and-the-jfk-assassination/
Wed, 22 Nov 2017 14:02:14 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14854Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator.

President Trump recently authorized a mass declassification of documents relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Among the material subsequently released, one document that … More>

]]>Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator.

President Trump recently authorized a mass declassification of documents relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Among the material subsequently released, one document that instantly grabbed headlines was a December 1966 FBI memo reporting the reaction of Soviet and Communist Party USA officials to the Kennedy shooting. The document was headlined in (among other publications) the New York Post, which, in turn, was flagged at the top of the Drudge Report, which attracted a lot of readers. Old JFK conspiracy theorists picked up the torch and were off and running.

“The Soviet Union theorized that President Lyndon B. Johnson could have been behind JFK’s assassination,” began the New York Post, “and also learned Moscow could be blamed and attacked, according to documents in a major release of files related to Kennedy’s slaying.”

This sounds very intriguing, and very new. It isn’t new. And it also requires crucial historical context, especially as certain conspiracy theorists thump their chest in quasi-vindication. Here I’d like to offer that context before delving into the contents of the newly declassified FBI memo.

In November 2013, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, Richard G. Jewell ’67, President Emeritus of Grove City College, offered his take on the crime of the century and what might have happened if John F. Kennedy hadn’t been killed that fateful day in Dallas. Click here to watch the 2013 J. Howard Pew Memorial Lecture.

I provide the context in a book that was published in May. That book, A Pope and a President, focused on Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, and deals at length with the Soviet role in the shooting of John Paul II, but also deals with the Soviet disinformation campaign launched in response to the Kennedy assassination.

The Soviets were extremely cynical and extremely shrewd. In late November 1963, they immediately saw how the American left reacted to the Kennedy shooting. American liberals didn’t waste a minute hysterically blaming everything and everyone but Lee Harvey Oswald and his love of communism, the USSR, and Castro’s Cuba. Of course, those were the obvious motivations behind the bullet fired into the head of America’s young president. And yet, liberals back then, in November 1963, attempted to blame the shooting on “right-wing hysteria,” on “conservatism,” on right-wing “hate.” They smeared the entire city of Dallas as a “City of Hate.” They fingered right-wing “extremism,” “paranoia,” “kooks,” gun violence, and an assorted list of bogeymen on the right. They even oddly hurled stones at the rightist, intensely anti-communist John Birch Society. This was an especially brazen charge given that Oswald in April 1963 had tried to assassinate Edwin Walker, a retired U.S. Army general who headed the Dallas chapter of the Birch Society; in fact, Oswald used the same rifle to shoot Kennedy.

Nonetheless, American liberals had their narrative, and it did not take long for them to run with it to besmirch their domestic political opponents.

No sooner than the very afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren blamed Kennedy’s shooting on “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” In his eulogy at Kennedy’s funeral, Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield attributed the shooting to “bigotry, hatred, and prejudice.” Popular columnist Drew Pearson blamed the shooting on a “hate drive.” In his first column after the assassination, James “Scotty” Reston, longtime liberal columnist for the New York Times, lamented the “violent streak” and “strain of madness” plaguing America, which he placed at the feet of “extremists on the right.” Since the beginning of his administration, Kennedy had been “trying to damp down the violence of the extremists on the Right.” “America wept,” said Reston, not only for its dead young president, “but for itself.”

Nowhere in Reston’s article ascribing blame at America and her alleged deadly conservatives were these three words: Lee Harvey Oswald. And certainly nowhere were the words communism, Cuba, or the Soviet Union as driving inspirations of Oswald.

James Burnham, the conservative intellectual and convert from atheistic communism, once famously stated that “for the Left, the preferred enemy is always to the Right.” Reston’s reaction was spot-on confirmation of the Burnham maxim. The New York Times rewarded it with a prominent page-one display.

And thus, no doubt sensing how easy this could be, with a more-than-receptive audience on the American left, the Soviets wasted no time doing what they did best: concocting malicious disinformation. If the American left was looking for phony demons as culprits for the Kennedy killing, Kremlin sorcerers were more than willing to conjure them up.

Detailing all of that here is too much, but two later sources were especially revealing in regard to these Soviet efforts: 1) the 1994 book, The First Directorate, by Oleg Kalugin, who spent 32 years in the Soviet KGB, rising to the rank of major general and chief of foreign counterintelligence, and 2) Ion Mihai Pacepa, in his 2013 book (co-authored with Ron Rychlak) Disinformation and his 2007 book on the Soviets and the Kennedy assassination.

As for Kalugin, he was the highest-ranking KGB officer to record his story. In November 1963, Kalugin was deputy station chief in Washington for the KGB. Kalugin notes that immediately after the disclosure that Oswald had Soviet connections (more on that in a moment), he and his fellow agents in Washington began receiving “frantic cables from KGB headquarters in Moscow, ordering us to do everything possible to dispel the notion that the Soviet Union was somehow behind the assassination” (which, to Kalugin’s limited knowledge, it was not). The Kremlin, he noted, was “clearly rattled by Oswald’s Soviet connection.” So, how to dispel that notion? Kalugin explained their orders: “We were told to put forward the line that Oswald could have been involved in a conspiracy with American reactionaries displeased with the president’s recent efforts to improve relations with Russia.” And so, said Kalugin, “I spoke with all my intelligence assets, including Russian correspondents and various U.N. employees, and told them to spread the official Soviet line. In the end, our campaign succeeded.”

It sure did. American liberals swallowed the Soviet line. They not only reflexively accepted Soviet innocence, but they heartily and happily pointed the finger at American conservatives — their preferred enemy.

As for Ion Mihai Pacepa, he argues two primary points: 1) The KGB had a thorough, ongoing, and very successful disinformation campaign to blame the Kennedy assassination on domestic elements in the United States, from “right-wingers” and anti-communists to the CIA (as Kalugin affirmed); and 2) Picking up from his 2007 book, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, Pacepa believes (and I cannot confirm) that the Soviets were involved in the actual assassination, or at least in earlier steps leading toward or helping to precipitate the event.

As to the first point, Pacepa recalls the date November 26, 1963, four days after Kennedy’s death. On that day, Soviet General Aleksandr Sakharovsky landed unannounced in Bucharest, where he met with Pacepa and other high-level members of Romanian intelligence and leadership. This was to be his first stop in a “blitz” tour of top KGB “sister” services in the Communist Bloc. “From him,” recalls Pacepa, “we in the DIE [Romanian intelligence] learned that the KGB had already launched a worldwide disinformation operation aimed at diverting public attention away from Moscow in respect to the Kennedy assassination, and at framing the CIA as the culprit.” Nikita Khrushchev himself, said Sakharovsky, wanted it made clear to the sister services that “this was by far our first and most important task.” It was crucial “to spread our version about the assassination before Washington could spread its own, so that our disinformation machinery could plant the idea on virgin soil that the CIA was responsible for the crime.” They also circulated rumors that Lyndon Johnson specifically and the “military-industrial complex” generally had been involved.

To repeat: The Kremlin peddled deliberate disinformation about the alleged role of LBJ in killing Kennedy.

The effort would be called Operation Dragon. It became, said Pacepa, one of the most successful disinformation operations in contemporary history. Pacepa points to Hollywood film director Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, JFK, which blamed the Kennedy assassination on a cabal that included the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, and the military-industrial complex. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won two.

The material from Pacepa is just one source for this information. There are other excellent sources, but I need not lay them out here. Generally, they show how Moscow did its dirtiest to direct eyes of suspicion elsewhere, especially toward “ultra-right” elements in the United States. Pravda would claim that American “reactionaries” were exploiting Kennedy’s death to try to “fan anti-Soviet and anti-Cuban hysteria.”

That’s the context we already knew — or should have known — prior to the new Trump declassification of a December 1, 1966 FBI memo titled, “Reaction of Soviet and Communist Party Officials to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

That document (click here) begins by noting that “officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup.’ They seemed convinced that that assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part. They felt that those elements interested in utilizing the assassination and playing on anticommunist sentiments in the United States would then utilize this act to stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba and thereafter spread the war.”

As I’ve shown in the historical context above, this was precisely the Soviet Party line. Thus, this longtime secret FBI memo — only now released — merely reflected the Communist Party’s propaganda line at the time.

Speaking of which, in the next paragraph in the memo, the FBI repeated the Soviet line that sought to deflect any blame for the shooting on the far left, which is where it belonged: “It was the further opinion of the Soviet officials that only maniacs would think that the ‘left’ forces in the United States, as represented by the Communist Party, USA, would assassinate President Kennedy.”

Yeah, right. Only maniacs. This was classic communist mendacity.

The memo also added that “Soviet officials claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had no connection whatsoever with the Soviet Union. They described him as a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else.”

That was half-true. Yes, Oswald was disloyal to the United States of America, but he was fully loyal to the deadly ideology of communism.

The memo also reported — here going by a second unnamed source — that all the diplomatic personnel at the Soviet Mission in the United States were just broken up by the news of Kennedy’s death. It was a “considerable shock,” which they “very much regretted” to hear.

Sure, comrade. I bet the boys in the Kremlin were all torn up. Crocodile tears in Moscow for their beloved JFK. The Soviet leadership just loved Jack Kennedy.

Never stopping with just one lie, or a series of prevarications, the KGB whoppers lathered the FBI memo. Yet another unnamed Communist Party source alleged that “now” the KGB was suddenly “in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.”

Yes, LBJ. And on this blockbuster… well, that data was never supplied in the memo.

The remainder of the memo repeated the Kremlin’s pleas of innocence that it had no connection between Oswald and the Kennedy shooting, even as both the memo and Kremlin itself unavoidably acknowledged that Oswald had indeed visited the USSR in 1959, had expressed his desire to defect to the Soviet Union, had shared his willingness to offer his services to the communist cause, and had even met his wife back in the USSR. The noble apparatchiks (allegedly) rejected Oswald as “mentally unstable” and sent him home.

As usual, you see, the Kremlin’s hands were squeaky clean — no dirt, no blood. This ghastly regime that murdered tens of millions graciously “had no interest” in a U.S. Marine looking to enlist his sniper rifle in their righteous cause.

As if all of that hogwash isn’t enough to make one sick at the putrid pile of bilious prevarications, the memo then claimed that “President Kennedy was held in high esteem by the Soviet government.”

Now that is pure bilge. No one, not even the most naïve Camelot liberal usually easily duped by the Kremlin, buys that bunkum.

And still worse, the final two pages of the six-page memo concluded with (at last) a named source. Who was this source? It was one Gus Hall, longtime head of Communist Party, USA, and a corrupt Party hack that even Moscow didn’t trust. Comrade Gus chimed in on December 4, 1963, not even two full weeks after the Kennedy shooting, assuring an unnamed FBI source that the assassination “could have been done by no one other than the ‘ultraright.’”

Thanks, Gus.

After that, Gus Hall literally headed back to his regular duty of pilfering Kremlin cash sent to subsidize his Party’s activities and cronies at CPUSA.

And finally, the FBI memo did, at last, mercifully, note that this angle on the Kennedy shooting by Communist Party USA had been set forth clearly in the Daily Worker. Yep, it sure had. The memo observed this common Party line was being used in Moscow as well — namely, in Pravda, Izvestia, and other “news” organs.

So, in short, what we have here with this widely publicized declassified document from December 1966, released three weeks ago to great and growing fanfare in some circles — including conservative ones — is merely a rehash of once-moribund Soviet and Communist Party USA malicious misinformation.

The stirred up stench of old Kremlin lies still smells so bad — with the denials and propaganda and disinformation so shameless — that it makes one wonder what Moscow was really seeking to cover up in November 1963.

]]>Birthday of a Bloodbathhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/11/birthday-of-a-bloodbath/
Mon, 06 Nov 2017 15:45:57 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14826A version of this article first appeared at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

This October-November 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the launch of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—the bloody communist state that would produce a political-ideological killing spree unlike any … More>

]]>A version of this article first appeared at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

This October-November 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the launch of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—the bloody communist state that would produce a political-ideological killing spree unlike any the world has ever seen.

And yet, communism continues to find supporters. Here are three personal anecdotes:

I did a conference this past week on the legacies of communism. One liberal professor complained that no pro-communist speakers were included. I wasn’t surprised.

Another case: a former student of mine this week told me of his professor (at a local college in Pittsburgh) who was hailing Karl Marx for his “brilliance.” Again, no surprise.

One more: A student from the University of Wisconsin called in to a talk-show I did last week insisting that capitalism is just as lethal as communism.

That all happened just this past week, and it’s not unusual in my world.

Anecdotes aside, an October 2016 poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation generated a stunning finding: almost one-third of Millennials “believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Joseph Stalin.” And it isn’t only those silly Millennials. More than one in four Americans generally believe Bush was the bigger killer.

That same report found that the vast majority of Americans (75 percent) underestimate the number of people killed by communist regimes, and a large majority (68 percent) believe Hitler killed more people than Stalin.

This begs the question: how many people did these ideological gangsters kill?

Well, here at the centenary of communism, the number “100” is fitting, given that 100 million is a good stab at the number of people annihilated by the Marxist-Leninist pathology the Bolsheviks sought to spread worldwide.

The Harvard University Press classic, The Black Book of Communism, endeavored to tabulate a communist death toll in the 20th century. It came up with a figure of 100 million. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation also arrives at that figure. Cal-Berkeley professor Martin Malia aptly noted that the communist record offers the “most colossal case of political carnage in history.”

And even then, this frightening number—100 million dead—is actually quite conservative.

Take the figure relating to the Soviet Union, for instance, where the Black Book recorded merely 20 million dead. Alexander Yakovlev, a high-level Soviet official who became one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief reformers, and who was given the post-Cold War task of trying to tally the victims, estimates that Stalin alone “annihilated … sixty to seventy million people.”

Similar levels of bloodshed was wrought by China’s Mao Tse-tung, who was responsible for the deaths of at least 60 million (according to the Black Book), but more likely over 70 million, according to the latest research. And then there were the killing fields of North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and more.

Among these, the North Korea butcher’s bill is close to 5-6 million. And we can hope and pray that the North Korea nightmare doesn’t take on a hideous nuclear dimension under Kim. Who knows how that one could end?

Really, the death generated by communist governments in the 20th century is closer to 140 million.

By comparison, Hitler’s genocide against Jews, Gypsies, the mentally disabled, and others he deemed “misfits,” was approximately 10 million.

Finally, another chilling figure for comparison: The combined dead from World Wars I and II—the most destructive conflicts in human history—was approximately 50-60 million. One must combine and then double the tolls of the two world wars to begin approaching communism’s mass slaughter.

Ronald Reagan called communism a “disease.” Actually, it’s hard to find a 20th century disease that killed as many people as this ideological pathology. Reagan put it better when he described communism as “evil” and “a form of insanity.”

And yet, so much of this evil insanity isn’t known, nor is it being taught, especially in our universities.

A frustrated James Kirchick of the liberal Daily Beast recently asked his readers, “How many times have you heard some formulation of this viewpoint? ‘Communism is an excellent idea in theory, it just hasn’t worked in practice.’ I wish that was the sort of sentiment I only remembered from college dorm room bull sessions.”

Kirchick responded, “OK. How many more millions of people have to die before we get it right?”

Good question.

And so, as communism marks its centennial, we should remember it for what it did best: death.

]]>New York Times: communism “made life better” for Chinese womenhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/10/new-york-times-communism-made-life-better-for-chinese-women/
Fri, 06 Oct 2017 13:20:27 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14786Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

I recently wrote about a shocking piece in the New York Times peddling a line we literally would’ve once expected from the Daily Worker or Pravda. … More>

]]>Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

I recently wrote about a shocking piece in the New York Times peddling a line we literally would’ve once expected from the Daily Worker or Pravda. The Times ran a strange article asserting that Soviet Bloc women enjoyed “better sex under communism.”

This was merely one such article in an odd and at times almost-celebratory series by the Times on the so-called “Red Century,” marking this year’s centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Most people might prefer to solemnly mark those 100 years with more significant facts like, say, the 100 million corpses produced by communist governments in those years, and still accumulating in places like North Korea, Cuba, and China. But not the folks at the New York Times: the Times informs its readers that communism … well, it wasn’t so bad after all—especially for women.

Well, the Times struck again last week with another stunner that once upon a time would have been immediately dismissed as silly communist propaganda fomented by a party organ in Moscow or Havana. Last week, the Times doubled down with another jaw-dropper on how communism has been just fabulous for women—this time in China.

“The Communists did many terrible things,” conceded this latest Times assessment, quoting a Chinese communist grandmother. “But they made women’s lives much better.”

Really?

The piece stems from an increasingly predictable and lamentable set of assertions being pushed by the political left in regard to communism. To wit: communism graciously delivered women into the workforce, communism generously took care of women’s (burdensome) children in daycare centers, communism bestowed upon women magnificent new rights (read: abortion), communism handed women great “free” education, and communism generally turned the lucky woman worker-bee of the Proletariat into a dazzling new Communist Woman.

Schools. Factories. Farms. Abortion clinics. And 24/7 state daycare for the worker-child.

Presumably, to today’s progressive, this litany is judged a bountiful buffet of ideological eye-candy. These are deemed terrific advances that made women’s lives better under communism.

And yet, this particular Times article is actually worse than that. The author argues that Mao’s totalitarian state didn’t quite go far enough into the home. The chairman and his central planners didn’t do enough in freeing women of their children and household chores. The author writes:

While the Communist revolution brought women more job opportunities, it also made their interests subordinate to collective goals. Stopping at the household doorstep, Mao’s words and policies did little to alleviate women’s domestic burdens like housework and child care. And by inundating society with rhetoric blithely celebrating its achievements, the revolution deprived women of the private language with which they might understand and articulate their personal experiences.

When historians researched the collectivization of the Chinese countryside in the 1950s, an event believed to have empowered rural women by offering them employment, they discovered a complicated picture. While women indeed contributed enormously to collective farming, they rarely rose to positions of responsibility; they remained outsiders in communes organized around their husbands’ family and village relationships. Studies also showed that women routinely performed physically demanding jobs but earned less than men, since the lighter, most valued tasks involving large animals or machinery were usually reserved for men.

The urban workplace was hardly more inspiring. Women were shunted to collective neighborhood workshops with meager pay and dismal working conditions, while men were more commonly employed in comfortable big-industry and state-enterprise jobs. Party cadres’ explanations for this reflected deeply entrenched gender prejudices: Women have a weaker constitution and gentler temper, rendering them unfit for the strenuous tasks of operating heavy equipment or manning factory floors.

Quite astonishingly, the article makes no mention of poverty or starvation for women in communist China, where more people died than in any other country under communism (no small achievement). The 2000 Harvard University Press work, The Black Book of Communism, estimates that 65 million people died under Chinese communism mainly between 1957 and 1969 (the period covered in the New York Times piece). The latest research pegs the number nearer 70-80 million. That’s more than perished under Stalin’s Russia (the Black Book credits Russia with a mere 20 million killings). It also vastly surpasses Hitler’s Holocaust, and it’s actually higher than the combined deaths tolls of World War I and II.

The article doesn’t mention the government one-child cap on the offspring that women were permitted to bear; the forced abortion and sterilization; the abandoning of baby girls; the lives of prostitution assumed by countless Chinese women; or the fact that female infanticide (as a whole and as a percentage) and suicide is more prevalent in China than any other nation. Think about this: China has 20% of the world’s women but 56% of the world’s female suicides. For at least 20 years now, Chinese women have accounted for over half of the world’s suicides. According to the World Bank and World Health Organization, about 500 Chinese women kill themselves every day. Women under Chinese communism have killed themselves at a stunning rate.

Modern China faces a stunning demographic reality of tens of millions of missing women, particularly due to the one-child policy. Countless female fetuses were aborted once identified via ultrasound by Chinese parents who, given the option of having one child—and preferring a boy—decided to abort the girl. Moreover, among undesired girls who were at least fortunate to be born, many parents opted to abandon their baby girl at an orphanage. Notice that the vast majority of Chinese children raised by adoptive American parents are girls.

Even Hillary Clinton, way back when she was first lady, criticized China for its poor treatment of women. “It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food or drowned” simply because they are born female, said Clinton in Beijing in September 1995, and “it is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.”

But the Times piece wasn’t focused on that. It’s a new day at the Times—a day and time to hail (not condemn) the achievements of the Red Century.

Sadly, I’m not surprised by this. I’ve long observed carefully and painfully how modern leftists—especially in education—have been making a hard push to portray communism as good for women (and racial minorities). I first noticed this bizarre reality nearly 20 years ago when I was asked to do a comprehensive review of civics texts used by students in high schools. There, in these texts, I found the breathtaking assertion that communism had been good for women in Bolshevik Russia—with the only evidence offered that women were thrust into the workforce and were given the ultimate gift of legalized abortion.

What more does a gal need, eh?

As for China, I saw similar claims in the texts, especially regarding the population situation. The first thing that should come to mind when thinking of communist China and population is the state’s refusal of a woman and her husband to have more than one child. It’s difficult to imagine a more demeaning and crude and crass violation of a most basic human right: the right to reproduce. How dare any government tell its people that they can’t have children? But such is not the take in many of these awful texts. The texts present the one-child policy as a prudent, caring government step to curb “overpopulation” and to achieve “modernization.”

One is left puzzling at how every nation in history that achieved modernization managed to do so without a one-child limit. (For the record, China is now moving to a two-child policy.)

Sadly, such basic facts and common sense are absent from many of the textbooks used to “teach” students today. They are sorely lacking in our K-12 schools, our universities, and (of course) at the newspaper-of-record for the progressive left: the New York Times.

So, here we are again, with the Times carrying the torch. The political left has found a new front in arguing for communism: Marxism-Leninism, dear progressives, was just tremendous for women.

What an outrage. This October 2017 marks the centenary of communism. Let’s remember communism in China and worldwide for what it truly delivered unlike any other ideology: death.

]]>Forgotten conservative: Remembering George Schuylerhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/09/forgotten-conservative-remembering-george-schuyler/
http://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/09/forgotten-conservative-remembering-george-schuyler/#respondFri, 08 Sep 2017 14:54:19 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14736Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

It was 40 years ago, August 31, 1977, that George Schuyler died. He has been largely forgotten, and that’s a shame. At one point, Schuyler was one … More>

]]>Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

It was 40 years ago, August 31, 1977, that George Schuyler died. He has been largely forgotten, and that’s a shame. At one point, Schuyler was one of the most recognized and read columnists in America, particularly from his platform at one of America’s great African-American newspapers—the Pittsburgh Courier. He was also one of the nation’s top conservative voices.

My colleague Mary Grabar, who is writing a book on Schuyler and has done some of the best research and public speaking on the man, tells me about contacting two leading modern African-American conservatives about Schuyler. I’ll leave them unnamed, but it pained me to hear that one of them hadn’t even heard of Schuyler. It pains me more to know how many conservatives generally (black or white) have never heard of the man.

Raised in Syracuse, New York, George S. Schuyler would spend a crucial formative period in his 20s in the ideological asylum of New York City, where he devoted some time and energies to the left’s gods that failed: socialism and communism.

Schuyler was never a communist, which he excoriated with his brilliant, colorful flare. He was especially aghast at vigorous communist recruitment of African-Americans.

“The Negro had difficulties enough being black without becoming Red,” wrote Schuyler in his autobiography, Black and Conservative. He warned fellow African-Americans that “an attempt was being made by Communists to make a dupe out of the Negro which could only end in race war and his extermination.”

That was precisely what happened to Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the leading black American communist in the 1920s, who a decade later—after following his heart to Stalin’s USSR—perished in the Gulag. In the end, Lovett Fort-Whiteman was a black man treated the same way as a white man under Soviet communism: he was killed.

“With Communism bringing only misery to white people,” asked Schuyler, “what could it offer non-whites?” He saw right through communists and how they were seeking “viable tactics for corralling Negroes.”

Schuyler as early as June 1923, even before writing columns exposing communism, was publicly debating the likes of Soviet Comintern lackey Otto Huiswood, who Schuyler dubbed “a Red Uncle Tom always ready to do the Kremlin master’s bidding.” He blasted other black communists, from W.E.B. DuBois to Paul Robeson to Langston Hughes, and even called out (eventual) Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis. He lit up white socialists like Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, the English Fabians, and John Dewey, founding father of American public education.

“I never had any of the prevalent enthusiasm for the murderous Soviet regime,” explained Schuyler, referring specifically to American leftists/progressives of the day who thrilled over the “Soviet experiment.” He saw the Bolshevik regime “as a combined Asiatic Tammany and Mafia, much less democratic than Czarism had been. Many I encountered saw the Communists as the heralds of freedom, but to me they were a murderous gang, and I hoped they would be suppressed.”

This is good to remember today, as our universities and public schools teach our youth the extraordinary claim that—yeah, sure—the communists may have killed 100 million people or so, but they were good fighters for civil rights. That’s utter rubbish—a red herring. One wishes that George Schuyler were still around to eviscerate such nonsense.

Schuyler had no use for Bolshevism, but he did early in his formative years (1921) briefly join the Socialist Party. He learned the error of that way. He would soon come to reject “Socialist bilge” as much he spurned “Bolshevist twaddle.” And he didn’t hold back in blasting pro-Soviet leftists.

In response, Soviet sympathizers and “parlor pinks” (as Schuyler called them) teamed up in writing a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier demanding that Schuyler be immediately fired. Schuyler publicly responded to them (“appropriately,” he noted) on April Fools’ Day 1938. There, he marveled at “the stampede to Communism by so-called intellectuals,” which he said was “no more intelligent than a stampede of cattle.” These intellectuals had been “hypnotized by the sonorous and hollow hokum of revolutionary psychopaths” in Moscow who promised to “usher in a world of love by increasing the volume of hatred.” These “goose-stepping ‘intellectuals’ began to yammer the praises of Stalin,” and saw “everything in America as bad and everything in Russia as good.” Said Schuyler, “they are the most disillusioned people in the country.”

Schuyler was particularly scathing in denouncing the Comintern-Communist Party USA efforts to create a separate, segregated African-American state in the South. Yes, that’s right. In 1930, at a Comintern conference in Moscow, a resolution was passed calling for a Soviet-directed and controlled “Negro Republic” among America’s Southern states. The Soviet Comintern, working through American communists, actually crafted plans for a “separate Negro state.” The strategy was to foment an African-American rebellion within the South, which would join forces with a workers’ uprising in the North. As Mary Grabar notes, Schuyler wrote brilliantly against what he dubbed “The Separate State Hokum.”

Schuyler instead preferred African-American voices like the great Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington rather than gushing admirers of Stalin like Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, the latter of whom had urged his fellow Americans to “put one more ‘S’ in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA when we take control will be the USSA.”

While blasting collectivism, Schuyler extolled the virtues of conservatism, which he spoke of in very American terms, and which he applied to race. He wrote in Black and Conservative:

The American Negro is a prime example of the survival of the fittest…. He has been the outstanding example of American conservatism: adjustable, resourceful, adaptable, patient, restrained…. This has been the despair of the reformers who have tried to lead him up on the mountain and who have promised him eternal salvation. Through the succeeding uproars and upheavals that have attended our national development, the Negro has adjusted himself to every change with the basic aim of survival and advancement…. The ability to conserve, consolidate, and change when expedient is the hallmark of individual and group intelligence.

He said that black Americans “have less reason than any others to harbor any feelings of inferiority.”

Schuyler wrote those words in 1966. Think of all the black Americans who since that time have persevered and truly achieved the American dream. If ever there was a group that survived and thrived with government directly stacked against them—from legalized slavery to Dred Scott—it has been African-Americans. They embody the conservative philosophy of looking to oneself and one’s God rather than to one’s government.

Schuyler affirmed: “I learned very early in life that I was colored but from the beginning this fact of life did not distress, restrain, or overburden me. One takes things as they are, lives with them, and tries to turn them to one’s advantage or seeks another locale where the opportunities are more favorable. This was the conservative viewpoint of my parents and my family. It has been mine through life.”

Schuyler was, in that sense, American above all else.

“The more I read about him, the more I see that Americanism was the consistent element in Schuyler’s thought,” says Mary Grabar. “He did flirt with socialism and even some communist ideas, but he never once entertained the thought that he was less than 100 percent American.”

And throughout that American life, George Schuyler’s columns were read by millions of Americans. He was a leading voice of conservatism, and arguably the top (at least in his time) black conservative. We should pause to remember the man, his mighty pen, and his contributions.

]]>http://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/09/forgotten-conservative-remembering-george-schuyler/feed/0VIDEO — Reagan Forum Lecture — featuring Dr. Paul Kengorhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/08/video-reagan-forum-lecture-featuring-dr-paul-kengor/
Thu, 24 Aug 2017 13:49:57 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14687On August 8, 2017, Dr. Paul Kengor, executive director of The Center for Vision & Values and political science professor at Grove City College, gave a Reagan Forum lecture at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, CA. Kengor discusses his … More>]]>On August 8, 2017, Dr. Paul Kengor, executive director of The Center for Vision & Values and political science professor at Grove City College, gave a Reagan Forum lecture at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, CA. Kengor discusses his new book, A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.

From the Reagan Foundation: “Based on Kengor’s tireless archival digging and his unique access to Reagan insiders, A Pope and a President reveals: The many similarities and the spiritual bond between the pope and the president—and how Reagan privately spoke of the “DP”: the Divine Plan to take down communism, a startling insider account of how the USSR may have been set to invade the pope’s native Poland in March 1981—only to pull back when news broke that Reagan had been shot, and more. As kindred spirits, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II united in pursuit of a supreme objective—and in doing so they changed history.”

Cardinal Karol Wojtyła arrived in the United States for a six-week visit in the summer of 1976. The Polish cardinal came to America that bicentennial summer for a festive celebration of intimacy … More>

]]>Editor’s note: This article first appeared at Stream.org.

Cardinal Karol Wojtyła arrived in the United States for a six-week visit in the summer of 1976. The Polish cardinal came to America that bicentennial summer for a festive celebration of intimacy with Jesus: the Church’s Forty-First International Eucharistic Congress. It was held in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress had declared independence two hundred years earlier. He traveled throughout the United States, visiting cities big and small. He began his trek in Boston, home of revolutionary patriots.

The Eucharistic Congress ran August 1–8. The huge event included a little-known nun named Mother Teresa, whom Wojtyła had met only recently. Wojtyła and Mother Teresa were overshadowed by the presence of names better known at the time: Dorothy Day, Cardinal John Krol and even President Gerald Ford, who attended Mass in the city’s Municipal (JFK) Stadium on August 3.

Wojtyła’s Message of Freedom

Wojtyła spoke at that Mass, which was dedicated to “The Eucharist and Man’s Hunger for Freedom.” The cardinal’s speech might as well have had the same title. He gave a powerful statement expressing not just the goodness of the Body of Christ but also his sense of the forces of evil threatening the world — the forces aligned against freedom, the freedom that man wanted and that God wanted for man. The cardinal from communist-occupied Poland was very much aware that he was speaking in a country that just a month earlier had celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of its own triumph of freedom.

Wojtyła started by quoting from Luke’s Gospel:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me; he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free.

These, said the cardinal, were the words of a thirty-year-old Christ as He arose in the synagogue of Nazareth facing His fellow countrymen officially for the first time. By those words, He revealed His messianic mission. That same Christ, said Wojtyła, “today faces us all, the People of the New Covenant, here on American soil, in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.”

The future pontiff then addressed the “hunger of the human soul, which is no less than the hunger for real freedom.” Each of us to some extent knows what this freedom is, said Wojtyła. “It is the principal trait of humanity and the source of human dignity.” He quoted from the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. That documentaffirmed that “authentic freedom” is “an exceptional sign of the divine image within man” and that “man’s dignity demands that he act according to a conscious and free choice.” Wojtyła continued, sharing words that the Protestants who signed the Declaration of Independence in that city two hundred years earlier would have appreciated:

Freedom is at the same time offered to man and imposed upon him as a task. It is in the first place an attribute of the human person and in this sense it is a gift of the Creator and an endowment of human nature. For this reason it is also the lawful right of man; man has a right to freedom, to self-determination, to the choice of his life career, to acting according to his own convictions. Freedom has been given to man by his Creator in order to be used, and to be used well.

Thus, God is the antithesis of the earthly destroyers of freedom — men like the totalitarians in Moscow and other communist capitals. As Fulton Sheen wrote in Peace of Soul, “God refuses to be a totalitarian dictator in order to abolish evil by destroying human freedom.”

A Hunger for Freedom

Of course, Cardinal Wojtyła said, we know perfectly well that man abuses liberty. Man can do wrong because he is free.

That is the risk.

That is also the beauty of freedom. As Wojtyła noted, the Creator has given man freedom not so that he will commit evil but so he will do good: “Freedom has been given to man in order to love, to love true good.”

This was an view of freedom that Pope John Paul II would underscore again and again. The concept would be central to some of John Paul’s greatest encyclicals, including Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) and Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason).

Expressing an idea that Ronald Reagan often communicated, Wojtyła said that there is a universal aspiration for freedom:

The hunger for freedom passes through the heart of every man. … The hunger for freedom passes also through the history of the human race, through the history of nations and peoples. It reveals their spiritual maturity and at the same time tests it.

Americans had gained that freedom, said Wojtyła, whereas Poles had lost theirs. It was time for freedom to reassert itself. Now Poland needed help for its own independence — from the clutches of godless communism.

Would an American leader step forward to assist in that cause?

God and Reagan in Kansas City

As Karol Wojtyła toured America, his future partner in the crusade against communism was crisscrossing the country as well. Ronald Reagan was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. In that endeavor, Reagan boldly challenged the sitting Republican president. It was an audacious move, but Reagan felt he had no choice. Gerald Ford’s presidency had been disappointing in many ways, not least in his embrace of détente.

The previous summer, President Ford had mistreated Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during the great Soviet dissident’s much-anticipated visit to America. Ford snubbed Solzhenitsyn because he did not want to anger Soviet authorities.

Solzhenitsyn had been in Washington to speak to the AFL-CIO, just down the street from the White House. It was a perfect time for Ford to meet with him. Conservatives, from Republicans like Reagan, Jack Kemp and Jesse Helms to anticommunist Democrats like Scoop Jackson, urged the president. Ford refused. He was backed by his right-hand man in foreign policy, Henry Kissinger. The Ford administration dared not offend Leonid Brezhnev’s regime by shaking hands with the Kremlin’s enemy. Worse, as historian Douglas Brinkley recorded, Ford privately called Solzhenitsyn “a godd*mn horse’s a**.”

Even the liberal New York Times editorial board and Jimmy Carter slammed President Ford for refusing to meet with Solzhenitsyn. William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review actually considered endorsing Carter in 1976 in response.

For Reagan, Ford’s humiliation of Solzhenitsyn was one of the last straws. He was so rankled that he decided to challenge Ford. Like Karol Wojtyła, Reagan wanted America to take the lead in the fight for freedom. If only Americans would seize that role with the right leadership, they could win the Cold War, and the Soviets could lose.

Reagan wanted to provide that leadership. And so he went to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City with an unlikely upset victory in mind. How close did he come to pulling it off?

Extremely.

The Letter to the Future

At the last minute, a number of key states at the convention moved into Reagan’s column and nearly allowed the former governor to overtake Ford. In the dramatic showdown at Kansas City’s Kemper Arena on August 19, Reagan missed the nomination by a little over a hundred votes. He grabbed 47.4 percent of delegates in an 1,187–1,070 contest.

Ford let out a huge sigh of relief.

Once the final ballots were in, a gracious Ford waved to Reagan and Nancy in their box in the arena. With all the TV cameras fixed on the Reagans, before a national audience of tens of millions, Ford invited them to the main stage, as the GOP faithful shouted: “Ron! Ron! Ron! … Speech! Speech! Speech!” “Ron, will you come down and bring Nancy?” pleaded Ford. A reluctant Reagan relented, telling Nancy as they were whisked through backstage corridors, “I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m going to say.”

Well, Reagan figured out what to say. He proceeded to give, extemporaneously, one of the finest, most memorable speeches of his life.

“If I could just take a moment,” Reagan began. Then dove in with gusto:

I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our tercentennial. It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and issues of the day and I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day. And then, as I tried to write. …

Here Reagan paused, asking his audience to turn their minds to the same task: what would each of them write “for people a hundred years from now who know all about us? We know nothing about them. We don’t know what kind of a world they’ll be living in.”

Reagan then gave his response to the assignment, which related to nuclear war and a civilized world:

We live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, that can, in a matter of minutes, arrive in each other’s country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in. And suddenly it dawned on me. Those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.”

Reagan pondered:

Will they look back with appreciation and say, “Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept our world from nuclear destruction” ? … This is our challenge.

“There’s a Reason for This”

Everyone in the room was locked in, completely silent. “The power of the speech was extraordinary,” said Edmund Morris. “And you could just feel throughout the auditorium the palpable sense among the delegates that [they had] nominated the wrong guy.”

They had indeed. Gerald Ford, their nominee, went on to lose the presidency to Jimmy Carter.

The conventional wisdom was that four years later, in 1980, Reagan would be too old for the presidency. Going down in ’76, he was down for good.

The loss was traumatic for everyone, except Ronald Reagan. His daughter, Maureen, cried for days. She later recalled that each time her father saw her he would ask, “Are you still crying?” Finally, Reagan pulled his daughter aside and shared his calming “God-has-a-plan” theology. “There’s a reason for this,” he told Maureen. “Everything happens for a reason. … If you just keep doing what you’re doing, the path is going to open up.”

For Ronald Reagan, as for Karol Wojtyła, there was a reason: a shared sense that God had a plan for him in the world and the course of history.

It was a course that within just a few short years was about to change dramatically. The world would face a new president in the White House and a new pope at the Vatican.

]]>Trump’s Excellent Speech in Poland, on Poland, and about Polandhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/07/14538/
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 13:38:17 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14538Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

Before I write this defense of Donald Trump in Poland, let me remind readers—from the right and the left—that I come to this subject with some credibility. … More>

]]>Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.

Before I write this defense of Donald Trump in Poland, let me remind readers—from the right and the left—that I come to this subject with some credibility. Not only have I written many articles and even books on the likes of John Paul II and Poland but I’ve been highly critical of Donald Trump, especially his past statements on NATO and Russia. My biggest concern about Trump in foreign policy was precisely this area. His gullibility toward Vladimir Putin and the Russians on the campaign trail in 2016 appalled me. I was very fearful (and still am) of a President Trump being manipulated by the Kremlin in a damaging way we haven’t seen from a Republican president. We conservatives have come to expect Democratic presidents to be dupes to the Kremlin, from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama. But we expect better from a Republican president.

In fact, it was exactly this time last year, in July 2016, that Trump revealed Roosevelt-like pretenses when he glowed in one of his silliest Tweets: “Putin likes me.” That was same the language that FDR had used about Stalin as Stalin exploited him. (“He likes me,” Roosevelt boasted to Churchill on March 18, 1942, grinning in self-satisfaction over warm feelings he felt from his pal “Uncle Joe.”)

Trump’s naïveté was not limited to Twitter outbursts. Shortly after that July 25, 2016 Tweet, he appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” where he again engaged in humiliating self-flattery regarding Putin: “He has said nice things about me over the years,” Trump cooed. “I remember years ago, he said something, many years ago, he said something very nice about me.”

Once Trump was elected, my glimmer of hope was that such awful statements would give way to shrewd advisers that would set him along a firmer policy path and more sensible statements toward our friends in Poland and the Baltic region—the very survivors of the Soviet communist onslaught whose liberation we sought.

Well, that brings me to Trump’s speech in Warsaw last week.

The Donald Trump in Warsaw in July 2017 was so much better than the Trump of July 2016. In fact, I must go further: Trump’s speech in Poland was outstanding.

It is important to understand that I came to that conclusion after reading every line of the speech unfiltered, without listening to a single reaction. I was tasked to analyze the speech by a Polish publication with an immediate turnaround deadline. I didn’t consult anyone. I didn’t gaze at the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC and Fox. Thus, when I later glimpsed the hysterical, warped, vicious rants by people on the left—losing their minds over alleged Trump grunts about “Western civilization”—I shook my head in disgust. Especially appalling was the charge that Trump was blowing “white-nationalist dog whistles” in Warsaw.

It literally pains me to waste time and ink responding to these tirades, which outdo some of the worst examples of Trump’s own hyperbole. They are totally out-of-line and utterly undeserving of a response.

The truth is that this was an excellent speech that Trump made in Poland—and that’s because the speech was on Poland. It was about Poland.

Here’s a stunner for you: Click a link to the transcript and see if you can find the phrase “Western civilization.” It isn’t there. (Yes, it has several references to the “West.”) By contrast, words like “Poland,” “Polish,” and “Poles” appear nearly 70 times. John Paul II was mentioned three times, and thus three times more than Western civilization was mentioned. Copernicus and Chopin and Pulaski and Kosciuszko and George Washington and Ronald Reagan and the Katyn Woods and the Miracle at Vistula were each mentioned more than Western civilization. The Warsaw Ghetto and Warsaw Uprising and the saving of Jews were mentioned 12 times by this loathsome white-nationalist dog-whistler—who paused to hail the special guests in the audience who rescued Poland’s Jews.

Enough of the left-wing hokum and handwringing. What we’re hearing there is less about Trump and Western civ than the left and Western civ. Liberals despise Western civ. They’ve annihilated it in their universities. They refuse to teach it. It is firmly fixed in their crosshairs.

You want a dog whistle? Here it is: Commend Western civ, and then watch liberals go barking mad. It’s precisely that university-trained ideological perversity that prompts mis-educated college students in Indiana to mistake a Dominican friar for a klansman. (Think I’m exaggerating? Click here.) It’s what prompts an Ivy League graduate to look at the American Founding and think not of the laws of nature and nature’s God but of trans-phobia.

Enough. Let’s not dignify these political-ideological obsessions. Let’s not take the bait. Now, on to the speech….

The text of Trump’s remarks is roughly 3,600 words, interrupted several times by sustained chants of “Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump!” That’s no surprise for anyone who knows anything about Poland, as President Trump’s speechwriter clearly did. If you understand the 20th century crucible that was Poland—the “martyred nation of Poland,” as Ronald Reagan called it—the earthly hell that the Polish people went through, then you’ll appreciate why Poles were so moved by this speech.

It started with the opening, where President Trump called it a “profound honor” to be in Warsaw and in “a Poland that is safe, strong and free.” He told Poles that America “is eager to expand our partnership with you.” It was, he noted, his first visit to Central Europe as president, and specifically to “this magnificent, beautiful piece of land.” He called Poland “the geographic heart of Europe” and the Polish people “the soul of Europe.”

He connected to Poland’s suffering: “Your nation is great because your spirit is great and your spirit is strong. For two centuries, Poland suffered constant and brutal attacks. But while Poland could be invaded and occupied and its borders even erased from the map, it could never be erased from history or from your hearts. In those dark days, you have lost your land, but you never lost your pride.” He affirmed: “Despite every effort to transform you, oppress you or destroy you, you endured and overcame.”

Trump saluted various Polish “great heroes” and patriots who joined American soldiers from the American Revolution all the way through Afghanistan and Iraq. Said Trump: “The story of Poland is the story of a people who have never lost hope, who have never been broken and who have never, ever forgotten who they are.”

This is a nation more than 1,000 years old. Your borders were erased for more than a century and only restored just one century ago.

In 1920, in the Miracle of Vistula, Poland stopped the Soviet Army bent on European conquest.

Then 19 years later, in 1938 [sic], you were invaded yet again; this time by Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east. That’s trouble.

That’s tough.

Under a double occupation, the Polish people endured evils beyond description: the Katyn Forest Massacre, the occupation, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the destruction of this beautiful capital city, and the deaths of nearly one in five Polish people.

A vibrant Jewish population, the largest in Europe, was reduced to almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland’s Jewish citizens, along with countless others during that brutal occupation.

In the summer of 1944, the Nazi and Soviet armies were preparing for a terrible and bloody battle right here in Warsaw. Amid that Hell on Earth, the citizens of Poland rose up to defend their homeland.

I am deeply honored to be joined on stage today by veterans and heroes of the Warsaw uprising.

What great spirit.

We salute your noble sacrifice and we pledge to always remember your fight for Poland and for freedom. Thank you. Thank you. […]

From the other side of the river, the Soviet armed forces stopped and waited.

They watched as the Nazis ruthlessly destroyed the city, viciously murdering men, women and children. […]

The Polish martyr Bishop Michal Kozal said it well: “More horrifying of a defeat of arms is a collapse of the human spirit.” Through four decades of Communist rule, Poland and the other captive nations of Europe endured a brutal campaign to demolish freedom, your faith, your laws, your history, your identity; indeed, the very essence of your culture and your humanity.

Yet through it all, you never lost that spirit.

Your oppressors tried to break you, but Poland could not be broken.

Anyone who dares to discern racist “white-nationalism” among these wonderful words of praise to a people who richly earned them needs serious help.

Trump next spoke of Poland’s most famous native son, Karol Wojtyla, who came to Warsaw as the first-ever Slavic pontiff and spoke at Victory Square on June 2, 1979, the start of nine days in Poland that changed history. Trump noted how Poles then had cried out, “We want God:”

The people of Poland, the people of America and the people of Europe still cry out, “We want God.” Together with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God.

Here were good words from an American president—words unheard by Polish ears over the previous eight years under President Barack Obama. And here, mercifully, was a new president who openly called out the “threat” of “radical Islamic terrorism,” here characterized by President Trump as another “oppressive ideology” that, like the “specter of communism,” seeks to “export terrorism and extremism all around the globe.” The 45th president asked for Poland’s help in defeating that “menace.” He said that “a strong Poland is a blessing to the nations of Europe … a blessing to the West, and to the world.”

Trump wrapped up the speech with stirring words that evoked John Paul II’s renowned thoughts of preserving Polish identity, culture, and memory:

Our freedom, our civilization and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture and memory. And today, as ever, Poland is in our heart, and its people are in that fight.

Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail, our people will thrive, and our civilization will triumph. […]

So together let us all fight like the Poles, for family, for freedom, for country and for God.

Even then, President Trump could have said more. For instance, he gave only a passing nod to the NATO joint security commitment, saying clearly but all-too-briefly: “we stand firmly behind Article V, the mutual defense commitment.” That was good to hear, but more needed to be said, especially from this particular speaker in light of his poor statements about NATO on the campaign trail.

Trump also should have said more about bringing Poland back into the joint U.S. missile-defense rubric that Obama dropped on September 17, 2009, the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s Red Army invasion of Poland—one of Obama’s shameless moments of accommodation of Vlad and the Russians. Trump said only, “we applaud Poland for its decision to move forward this week on acquiring from the United States the battle-tested Patriot air and missile defense system, the best anywhere in the world.”

Acquiring? As in, what, buying? The heck with that, man, build a joint missile shield with Poland! Stop the silly “financial obligation” baloney. This is a matter of serious national security, not silly populism for Fox News watchers.

More needs to be said on this from our president.

And likewise, Donald Trump didn’t exactly torch Vladimir Putin in this speech. There was only this small statement on Russia: “We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere and its support for hostile regimes, including Syria and Iran.”

That was it.

But alas, this speech was clearly intended to be less about drawing out policy than re-forging a bond between the United States and Poland, one that was ripped by the previous president his first year in office.

To be sure, Donald Trump was obviously so vastly better talking about Poland and NATO here than on the campaign trail in 2016 because he was scripted. He was reading words prepared for him by intelligent speechwriters and researchers.

In all, a great speech in Poland, on Poland, and about Poland.

]]>Marking Natural Law with Mark Levinhttp://www.visionandvalues.org/2017/07/marking-natural-law-with-mark-levin/
Thu, 06 Jul 2017 13:11:05 +0000http://www.visionandvalues.org/?p=14522Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at American Spectator.

The latter half of the title will draw eyes right away. Glancing the table of contents, I almost jumped straight ahead to the chapters on the “Progressive Masterminds” and the “Philosopher-Kings,” where you’ll find the dismal likes of Herbert Croly, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the awful John Dewey, Walter Weyl (the “Progressive Masterminds”), followed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the colossally destructive Karl Marx (“Philosopher-Kings”).

All of that is obviously intriguing, as are the chapters that follow on the tyranny of the administrative state vs. the blessings of liberty, property, and republicanism. But it’s actually the opening of the book—the very first chapter—that is indispensable and what I’d like to highlight here. It’s worth reading this summer and, in fact, any and every day of the year. Read it yourself and share it with others.

The opening of the book underscores the vital importance of natural law. That is, the vital importance of natural law to Americans and to all of humanity—and what has been forgotten in that respect. To rediscover Americanism is to rediscover natural law. Levin understands that.

And what is natural law? I’ll quote Levin first and then highlight just a portion of what he cites from others.

Levin writes that “natural law provides a moral compass or order—justice, virtue, truth, prudence, etc.—a fundamental, universal, everlasting harmony of mores that transcend human law. Through natural law discovered by right reason, man knows right from wrong and good from bad.”

Natural law is right law. And unfortunately, as Levin notes, “that which is naturally just may not be legally just.” Indeed, to the contrary, all sorts of governments make laws that are unjust, especially laws that ignore or violate the natural law, from the legal right to own a slave to the legal right to kill unborn children, from the denial of the inherent humanity and dignity of a black person (the Dred Scott case) to the denial of the inherent humanity and dignity of an unborn person (Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood). These laws of the state contravene the laws of nature. That, in essence, first and foremost, is why they are unjust laws.

To borrow the language of the Declaration of Independence, natural law stems from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The American Founders believed this. They adhered to it. You cannot understand the Founding, America, and Americanism without understanding this.

In this, the Founders invoked a tradition dating back to the Old and New Testaments, to Aristotle and Cicero, to Augustine and Aquinas. And in particular, they were inspired by the natural law writings of 17th century Englishman John Locke. Mark Levin puts it this way: “Locke said, as have others, that natural law is forever and enduring, and man-made law, which may vary from place to place and time to time, clearly is not. That which is just and virtuous is just and virtuous regardless of the passage of laws or time.”

This flies in direct contrast to the principles (if we can call them “principles”) of modern secular progressivism, where truths (if we can call them “truths”) are said to evolve over time, and that what is deemed just and virtuous (if we can call it “just” and “virtuous”) is in a constant state of never-ending flux and evolution—of “progress”—that forever unfolds and that always mysteriously lies ahead in the future rather than in anything immutable from the past. This is why the likes of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk—and the principles of conservatism—uphold the value of tradition, experience, and custom, so long as the traditions, experiences, and customs are grounded in the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God. Those are the permanent things, the first things, the fixed order knowable by reason and observable by the rules of nature and nature’s God.

Thus, as Levin notes, echoing the sentiments of Cicero, “natural law is superior to, and precedes, political and governmental institutions.” For instance, the Golden Rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—is a universally recognized ethic. It is referred to as the Golden Rule because it is universally true and just.

Hence, to stick with my earlier examples: to own and enslave or kill and maim another human being is always wrong because it’s always wrong—you know it, you sense it, you feel it—no matter what a majority of nine black-robed jurists might say or what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer and Cecile Richards and the Democratic National Committee might say.

On the matter of slavery, no American was, of course, as important as Abraham Lincoln. And it’s vital to realize that Lincoln appealed to natural law. Levin quotes a beautiful statement from Lincoln made in Lewistown, Illinois in August 1858. Lincoln knew that the Founders knew that slavery was wrong, even if they could not muster the will or way to personally and politically extricate themselves from it in 1776. Nonetheless, as Lincoln knew, they established the moral basis for why it was wrong in their very words. As Lincoln said of the Founders:

In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows…. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take course to renew the battle which their fathers began—so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was built.

Lincoln told his fellow countrymen that they may do with him whatever they chose, even “put me to death,” but they must nonetheless “heed these sacred principles.”

And that they remain: sacred. What is sacred should not be denied. Men can make laws of their own doing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those laws are just, or sacred.

That’s only a snippet of what Mark Levin offers in this book. He states from the outset that he’s well aware that this book will not be changing the course of history, “but if it can open a few eyes it will have served its purpose.”

Well, given Mark Levin’s platform and influence, and ability to sell books, it should open more than a few eyes—especially those who have been blinded to these truths by our ghastly government schools and monolithically left-wing universities. That means that Levin, via this book, will be educating a substantial number of Americans on vital concepts like natural law. In that, he’s truly doing the Lord’s work.